Commune Book One Travel Map #bookplanning #postapocalypse

You can view an interactive map showing the position of all the major events of Commune Book One by clicking the below image. This map was one of the major planning tools that I used when writing this novel.

5 thoughts on “Commune Book One Travel Map #bookplanning #postapocalypse”

This is a very cool companion to the book. One of the things I get the most fun out of when reading a book is following along with the narrative while looking at maps, Wikipedia entries on the persons, places and things mentioned in the story, etc. Reading books on a tablet makes this an almost seamless process, highlighting people and place names in the text then switching to a map app or web browser to look it up. I did find myself doing this a lot while reading Commune Book 1, and it helped me immerse myself into the story more. I tend to do that a lot with the history-based thrillers I usually read.

In looking at the Travel Map just now, I found it interesting to discover that Billy started on the Morongo reservation. That’s very close to my stomping grounds (I lived in Beaumont as a kid, and I currently work in Banning, which is adjacent to the res).

I’m glad its helpful. One of the things I was fighting with in this book was balancing how people talk naturally versus helping the reader to visualize what was going on. People don’t tend to describe a network of freeways and how they interconnect; they just say “I took the 15”. Well, if someone lives in the area that’s fine but outsiders might have an issue following along.

I compromised by allowing the characters to talk naturally but ensuring that every point they referred to in the story was somewhere real that you could find on a map.

Billy was always going to be a Morongo Indian when I started thinking about this story but the actual character changed quite a bit from what I originally envisioned. The original image of him that I had in my mind was Chief Dan George. But then I started researched the people that Billy came from and decided that would have to go out the window. For one thing, a Cahuilla would probably have more Hispanic or Latino genetic markers than those features commonly associated with the Hollywood American Indian (intense eyes, aquiline nose, broad cheeks, and square face). For another, many of the folks on the Morongo Tribal Council have appearances that could descend from anywhere in our culture.

Incidentally, you could look up the Morongo Tribal Council and actually get a good idea where the inspiration for Billy came from.

The character Billy was 100% my own creation in the book but it was critical to me that he not just be an idiotic stereotype. I wanted to do as much as I could to produce characters, places, and situations in line with reality rather than what Hollywood has programmed me to expect.

Sadly, the thing seems to have been lost to the aether. It was either a screw up on my part (having deleted it mistakenly) or it’s departed the digital realm for other reasons that remain heretofore unknown.

In most cases, the safe money points to blaming the moron that created it (me).